Central Heating Versions of Reality Quotes

This line shows the speaker's views of his life, and perhaps all reality, as transient. It's just a little flame in the darkness, insignificant, let to burn out. An interesting way that this line reflects on reality is the word "they." It's as if the power that decides when we live and die, thought by many people in the word to be one being, God, is suddenly plural, a "they." Stretch your mind and think about some great fire lighting committee that decides when we live and when we die—it's not a very heartening version of reality.

This line smacks "reality" on the head. Many people think that "seeing is believing," but our speaker here believes that whatever we see isn't real at all, but some artificial construct. We could view this line as stating the belief that whatever's beneath the visible is the most important, but somehow, we get the sense that it's not that optimistic. Knowing our speaker, this line is expressing his doubt in the reality of the world that surrounds him.

This line holds up touch—the human touch of the speaker's lover—as one of the things that is most real about the world. In this context, the speaker is denying its reality, but the details he provides as proof that the world is unreal actually have the opposite effect. They show us that the speaker doubts his own doubts about the reality of the world. So much doubt—it makes our head spin just to read about it! Now just imagine how the speaker must feel.